Actors: The Graven Image

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Skinny Years. The pursuit of perfection began at the age of five when Heston played his first role in the one-room schoolhouse he attended in northern Michigan. At Northwestern University, he worked with Classmates Patricia Neal and Ralph Meeker, met another hopeful actress, Lydia Clarke, who has been his wife for 22 years. After some skinny years in Manhattan, he got a supporting role in Katharine Cornell's Antony and Cleopatra ("Miss Cornell is a tall woman and likes to have tall actors around"). From there, it was roles in TV and a lead in his first film, Dark City. Today, Heston commands $500,000 a picture, plus 10% of the gross, gets control over cast and script. Says he, ruefully and rightfully: "I suppose I'm still not selective enough."

For all their affluence, the Hestons, their son Fraser, 11 (who played the infant Moses in The Ten Commandments), and adopted daughter, Holly Ann, 5, live sedately in an eight-room house on a ridge high over Coldwater Canyon near Hollywood. His major indulgence is a private tennis court, onto which he likes to coax name pros, who regularly clobber him. Otherwise, "Chuck" Heston, as friends call him, mostly stays inside doing calisthenics and culling scripts. It doesn't bother him to be called a square. "So," he says, "were Moses and Ben-Hur."